The First Lego League BC Provincial Championships were a nice opening live event production for the BCIT Television & Video Production students this year!

We had a great group of volunteers who donated their time on Friday and Saturday to produce the event. Our students were doing everything from running the cables to switching, directing, running the cameras and streaming the signal online. Check out the photo gallery for some behind the scenes production action!

We had a few technical issues with our internet feed that resulted in the quality being lower than we had hoped for, however a fix is in the works and we’re already looking forward to our next live event. Stay tuned!

Our Broadcast Journalism students are responsible for the stories and interviews that make up the content of our weekly BCIT Magazine production.

Practicum is an intensive 4-week process that ensures that all students get exposure to all aspects of Television & Video Production in a live environment, with the challenges and deadlines that exists in a real station.

Practicum begins another first this year, as BCIT Broadcast has installed two video servers as we move closer to gracefully retiring our tape infrastructure.

Our Facilis server is an 18 terrabyte storage server that provides us with almost 1400 hours of storage for our edit bays. The Omneon server is a play-to-air server which takes the final edited stories and allows playback through our control rooms.

Most of our aquisition and editing facilities are currently using digital tape formats, however we’re moving towards a totally tapeless workflow that allows us to go from acquisition to broadcast without any physical media (aside from memory cards) involved in the process.

Tape, old and busted…

Our Television & Video Production advisory committee, composed of broadcast and film professionals from Western Canada are very supportive of us making these changes.

Employers demand students and alumni trained in digital and tapeless production technology. BCIT delivers.

(Note: No students were blinded in the making of this science, but it was the best title I could come up with … The only other option was trying to find something that rhymed with “Bill Nye the Science Guy”)

So what’s this about Science? We had the opportunity to take our production on the road and head down to the Telus World of Science to do a live production of their Centre Stage science education show.

This was our first live event production using the new Broadcast Pix production flypack that we’ve been introducing the students to this semester (check the blog history for info on our practise events back at the school).

We are actively looking for projects that students can produce with our equipment to get additional production experience. If you have a project you’d like to submit, please feel free to contact us.

I have linked a copy of our SW Technical Production Manual that includes some project planning details for aspiring production staff out there (some contact information has been removed for privacy reasons).

We expect students to provide this type of documentation (and more!) when planning their projects.

Following our successful tests last week of our new, portable Broadcast Pix production system, this week we trained our first year students on it.

We used the portable system to successfully replicate the same “Studio 1 Live” show that we produced earlier in the year with a full control room, audio room, and VTR room within the broadcast centre. The possibilities are very interesting indeed…

Had a chance to get our new Broadcast Pix switcher up and running last week! Our HD gear is commissioned now as well, so we’re going to be starting HD productions in the next few weeks!

We’re starting the training process in order to get students out doing live multi-camera switched productions in the near future! Students will be looking for production opportunities (read: non-profit projects) soon!